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Crazy Weather

Wind, rain, hail, sleet, thunder, and lighting couldn’t dampen spirits on an overnight Wilderness Walk in the Crazy Mountains
Category: Community | | 4 min read

What would happen if you took nearly a dozen regular people into the backcountry and made them face hail, rain, sleet, wind, thunder, and lightning? Normally, you’d have a bunch of very unhappy campers, and perhaps an angry mob, on your hands. But make those folks backpackers, put them in a lovely mountain cirque, throw in a couple of beautiful mountain lakes, a mountain goat, and a real glacier in sight, you’d have a bunch of pretty happy, satisfied customers. And that’s what we had on a recent overnight Wilderness Walk into the Crazy Mountains, where we faced all of the weather mentioned above.

Ranging in age from 11 to somewhere north of 70, 10 of us headed up the incredibly bumpy Big Timber Creek road on the first Saturday morning in August. The forecast was for some clouds and potential showers, but nothing anyone would take too seriously. After all, the mountains always make their own weather.

A description of the facts of our route might make the trip sound pretty wimpy: 4 miles, only 1600 feet of elevation gain. But, as they say, the devil is in the details, and so it was on this day.

Washouts and floods had morphed the first three miles of the trail into a veritable rock garden and made stepping tricky and slow. But the more advanced-in-age preferred to think of the pace as “deliberate” rather than slow. It was here that the two 11-year old twins, Kiersten and Meghan, made it known that they had experience and skill far beyond their years.
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A description of the facts of our route might make the trip sound pretty wimpy: 4 miles, only 1600 feet of elevation gain. But, as they say, the devil is in the details, and so it was on this day.

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If you like blow downs, you’d love he last mile of the trail to Upper Twin Lake. Fortunately, enough previous hikers had developed some bypass paths around the huge fallen trees. That said, the going was, let’s say, deliberate. By the time our slower sub-group arrived at the lake, having applied their first aid and natural medicine skills to the hike leader, the lead sub-group had already scouted for camping spots.

An aside here: The Crazy Mountains are a checkerboard of public and private land. The checkerboard arises from the days when the Northern Pacific Railroad was laying track. Land owners gave the railroad land it needed for track in exchange for parcels high up in the Crazies. The patchwork of private lands today precludes leaving the trail (a legal right of way) in many places. It also makes camping at Twin Lakes limited, because the downstream end of the lake is not in the public domain.

In camp we moved quickly because we could tell that rain was imminent. The time in our tent as the storm hit was a bonus rest break after several hours of not-so-easy hiking. The shower passed quickly, and the sun threatened to appear, giving folks a chance to clean up, collect and treat water, relax, and chat without a big pack on their backs. Before we knew it, it was time to cook dinner. We gathered, but the gathering did not last long. Mother Nature needed to remind us who’s really in charge.

First came black skies, then thunder, and then lightning bolts less than a half-mile away, reverberating in the cirque in which we were camped. Next came wind, driving rain, a bit of hail, and finally sleet. Lots of it. Munching on our remaining dinner inside our tent, it felt like we had moved inside a drum during a marching band concert.

The excitement kept going for well over an hour, but it too eventually passed. People emerged from their tents to find the upper slopes of the surrounding mountains cloaked in white. Even though gear protected by pack covers were soaking wet, everyone seemed in pretty good spirits, as long as they did not fall into any of the newly formed puddles that seemed to be everywhere.

Overnight, it cleared off sufficiently that the temperature really dropped. That meant that even on the inside of double-walled tents, every surface was wet. A couple more nights like the one we had just and my goose-down sleeping bag would be a soggy mess.

When we arose, there was a hint of blue sky, but clouds kept building. Cooking breakfast and breaking camp simultaneously seemed to be the order of the day. Sure enough, the instant I stowed my last piece of gear in my backpack for the hike out, it started raining lightly.

The rain followed us back down through the fields of blowdowns and on to the rocky trail, but eventually lifted. The collective mood could have been somber and frustrated, but no, everyone seemed to be enjoying the hike. What was up?

Lunch along the creek at a lovely spot was cut short by the threat of more precipitation, but the consensus was that it had been a super trip, one that had really illustrated the beauty of the Crazy Mountains. I guess the upbeat spirits were yet another example of the value of taking people into wild places. It’s hard to go wrong there.

Roger Jenkins is a board member of MWA's Madison-Gallatin Chapter and, along with his wife Susie McDonald, a Wilderness Walks leader. You can follow Susie and Roger's other adventures at twohikers.org.

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